218 resultados para construction land
em Université de Lausanne, Switzerland
Resumo:
Syrian dry areas have been for several millennia a place of interaction between human populations and the environment. If environmental constraints and heterogeneity condition the human occupation and exploitation of resources, socio-political, economic and historical elements play a fundamental role. Since the late 1980s, Syrian dry areas are viewed as suffering a serious water crisis, due to groundwater overdraft. The Syrian administration and international development agencies believe that groundwater overexploitation is also leading to a decline of agricultural activities and to poverty increase. Action is thus required to address these problems.However, the overexploitation diagnosis needs to be reviewed. The overexploitation discourse appears in the context of Syria's opening to international organizations and to the market economy. It echoes the international discourse of "global water crisis". The diagnosis is based on national indicators recycling old Soviet data that has not been updated. In the post-Soviet era, the Syrian national water policy seems to abandon large surface water irrigation projects in favor of a strategy of water use rationalization and groundwater conservation in crisis regions, especially in the district of Salamieh.This groundwater conservation policy has a number of inconsistencies. It is justified for the administration and also probably for international donors, since it responds to an indisputable environmental emergency. However, efforts to conserve water are anecdotal or even counterproductive. The water conservation policy appears a posteriori as an extension of the national policy of food self-sufficiency. The dominant interpretation of overexploitation, and more generally of the water crisis, prevents any controversary approach of the status of resources and of the agricultural system in general and thus destroys any attempt to discuss alternatives with respect to groundwater management, allocation, and their inclusion in development programs.A revisited diagnosis of the situation needs to take into account spatial and temporal dimensions of the groundwater exploitation and to analyze the co-evolution of hydrogeological and agricultural systems. It should highlight the adjustments adopted to cope with environmental and economic variability, changes of water availability and regulatory measures enforcements. These elements play an important role for water availability and for the spatial, temporal, sectoral allocation of water resource. The groundwater exploitation in the last century has obviously had an impact on the environment, but the changes are not necessarily catastrophic.The current groundwater use in central Syria increases the uncertainty by reducing the ability of aquifers to buffer climatic changes. However, the climatic factor is not the only source of uncertainty. The high volatility of commodity prices, fuel, land and water, depending on the market but also on the will (and capacity) of the Syrian State to preserve social peace is a strong source of uncertainty. The research should consider the whole range of possibilities and propose alternatives that take into consideration the risks they imply for the water users, the political will to support or not the local access to water - thus involving a redefinition of the economic and social objectives - and finally the ability of international organizations to reconsider pre-established diagnoses.
Resumo:
In Switzerland, the issue of land consumption has made it to the front of the political agenda in recent years. Studies conducted on a national level have concluded that there is an excess of land zoned for construction (ARE, 2008), which is seen as contributing to urban sprawl. This situation is looked upon as a failure of the Federal Law on Spatial Planning (LAT, 1979) and there is a political push to change it in order to reinforce zoning regulations. In this article, we look on the issue from a different angle. While there may be large quantities of land zoned for construction, in many urban areas land actually available for development is scarce. Building on the idea that planning's efficiency is linked to its capacity of influencing actual land-use, we focus on how this situation can be dealt with within the current Swiss institutional context.
Resumo:
Summary Landscapes are continuously changing. Natural forces of change such as heavy rainfall and fires can exert lasting influences on their physical form. However, changes related to human activities have often shaped landscapes more distinctly. In Western Europe, especially modern agricultural practices and the expanse of overbuilt land have left their marks in the landscapes since the middle of the 20th century. In the recent years men realised that mare and more changes that were formerly attributed to natural forces might indirectly be the result of their own action. Perhaps the most striking landscape change indirectly driven by human activity we can witness in these days is the large withdrawal of Alpine glaciers. Together with the landscapes also habitats of animal and plant species have undergone vast and sometimes rapid changes that have been hold responsible for the ongoing loss of biodiversity. Thereby, still little knowledge is available about probable effects of the rate of landscape change on species persistence and disappearance. Therefore, the development and speed of land use/land cover in the Swiss communes between the 1950s and 1990s were reconstructed using 10 parameters from agriculture and housing censuses, and were further correlated with changes in butterfly species occurrences. Cluster analyses were used to detect spatial patterns of change on broad spatial scales. Thereby, clusters of communes showing similar changes or transformation rates were identified for single decades and put into a temporally dynamic sequence. The obtained picture on the changes showed a prevalent replacement of non-intensive agriculture by intensive practices, a strong spreading of urban communes around city centres, and transitions towards larger farm sizes in the mountainous areas. Increasing transformation rates toward more intensive agricultural managements were especially found until the 1970s, whereas afterwards the trends were commonly negative. However, transformation rates representing the development of residential buildings showed positive courses at any time. The analyses concerning the butterfly species showed that grassland species reacted sensitively to the density of livestock in the communes. This might indicate the augmented use of dry grasslands as cattle pastures that show altered plant species compositions. Furthermore, these species also decreased in communes where farms with an agricultural area >5ha have disappeared. The species of the wetland habitats were favoured in communes with smaller fractions of agricultural areas and lower densities of large farms (>10ha) but did not show any correlation to transformation rates. It was concluded from these analyses that transformation rates might influence species disappearance to a certain extent but that states of the environmental predictors might generally outweigh the importance of the corresponding rates. Information on the current distribution of species is evident for nature conservation. Planning authorities that define priority areas for species protection or examine and authorise construction projects need to know about the spatial distribution of species. Hence, models that simulate the potential spatial distribution of species have become important decision tools. The underlying statistical analyses such as the widely used generalised linear models (GLM) often rely on binary species presence-absence data. However, often only species presence data have been colleted, especially for vagrant, rare or cryptic species such as butterflies or reptiles. Modellers have thus introduced randomly selected absence data to design distribution models. Yet, selecting false absence data might bias the model results. Therefore, we investigated several strategies to select more reliable absence data to model the distribution of butterfly species based on historical distribution data. The results showed that better models were obtained when historical data from longer time periods were considered. Furthermore, model performance was additionally increased when long-term data of species that show similar habitat requirements as the modelled species were used. This successful methodological approach was further applied to assess consequences of future landscape changes on the occurrence of butterfly species inhabiting dry grasslands or wetlands. These habitat types have been subjected to strong deterioration in the recent decades, what makes their protection a future mission. Four spatially explicit scenarios that described (i) ongoing land use changes as observed between 1985 and 1997, (ii) liberalised agricultural markets, and (iii) slightly and (iv) strongly lowered agricultural production provided probable directions of landscape change. Current species-environment relationships were derived from a statistical model and used to predict future occurrence probabilities in six major biogeographical regions in Switzerland, comprising the Jura Mountains, the Plateau, the Northern and Southern Alps, as well as the Western and Eastern Central Alps. The main results were that dry grasslands species profited from lowered agricultural production, whereas overgrowth of open areas in the liberalisation scenario might impair species occurrence. The wetland species mostly responded with decreases in their occurrence probabilities in the scenarios, due to a loss of their preferred habitat. Further analyses about factors currently influencing species occurrences confirmed anthropogenic causes such as urbanisation, abandonment of open land, and agricultural intensification. Hence, landscape planning should pay more attention to these forces in areas currently inhabited by these butterfly species to enable sustainable species persistence. In this thesis historical data were intensively used to reconstruct past developments and to make them useful for current investigations. Yet, the availability of historical data and the analyses on broader spatial scales has often limited the explanatory power of the conducted analyses. Meaningful descriptors of former habitat characteristics and abundant species distribution data are generally sparse, especially for fine scale analyses. However, this situation can be ameliorated by broadening the extent of the study site and the used grain size, as was done in this thesis by considering the whole of Switzerland with its communes. Nevertheless, current monitoring projects and data recording techniques are promising data sources that might allow more detailed analyses about effects of long-term species reactions on landscape changes in the near future. This work, however, also showed the value of historical species distribution data as for example their potential to locate still unknown species occurrences. The results might therefore contribute to further research activities that investigate current and future species distributions considering the immense richness of historical distribution data. Résumé Les paysages changent continuellement. Des farces naturelles comme des pluies violentes ou des feux peuvent avoir une influence durable sur la forme du paysage. Cependant, les changements attribués aux activités humaines ont souvent modelé les paysages plus profondément. Depuis les années 1950 surtout, les pratiques agricoles modernes ou l'expansion des surfaces d'habitat et d'infrastructure ont caractérisé le développement du paysage en Europe de l'Ouest. Ces dernières années, l'homme a commencé à réaliser que beaucoup de changements «naturels » pourraient indirectement résulter de ses propres activités. Le changement de paysage le plus apparent dont nous sommes témoins de nos jours est probablement l'immense retraite des glaciers alpins. Avec les paysages, les habitats des animaux et des plantes ont aussi été exposés à des changements vastes et quelquefois rapides, tenus pour coresponsable de la continuelle diminution de la biodiversité. Cependant, nous savons peu des effets probables de la rapidité des changements du paysage sur la persistance et la disparition des espèces. Le développement et la rapidité du changement de l'utilisation et de la couverture du sol dans les communes suisses entre les années 50 et 90 ont donc été reconstruits au moyen de 10 variables issues des recensements agricoles et résidentiels et ont été corrélés avec des changements de présence des papillons diurnes. Des analyses de groupes (Cluster analyses) ont été utilisées pour détecter des arrangements spatiaux de changements à l'échelle de la Suisse. Des communes avec des changements ou rapidités comparables ont été délimitées pour des décennies séparées et ont été placées en séquence temporelle, en rendrent une certaine dynamique du changement. Les résultats ont montré un remplacement répandu d'une agriculture extensive des pratiques intensives, une forte expansion des faubourgs urbains autour des grandes cités et des transitions vers de plus grandes surfaces d'exploitation dans les Alpes. Dans le cas des exploitations agricoles, des taux de changement croissants ont été observés jusqu'aux années 70, alors que la tendance a généralement été inversée dans les années suivantes. Par contre, la vitesse de construction des nouvelles maisons a montré des courbes positives pendant les 50 années. Les analyses sur la réaction des papillons diurnes ont montré que les espèces des prairies sèches supportaient une grande densité de bétail. Il est possible que dans ces communes beaucoup des prairies sèches aient été fertilisées et utilisées comme pâturages, qui ont une autre composition floristique. De plus, les espèces ont diminué dans les communes caractérisées par une rapide perte des fermes avec une surface cultivable supérieure à 5 ha. Les espèces des marais ont été favorisées dans des communes avec peu de surface cultivable et peu de grandes fermes, mais n'ont pas réagi aux taux de changement. Il en a donc été conclu que la rapidité des changements pourrait expliquer les disparitions d'espèces dans certains cas, mais que les variables prédictives qui expriment des états pourraient être des descripteurs plus importants. Des informations sur la distribution récente des espèces sont importantes par rapport aux mesures pour la conservation de la nature. Pour des autorités occupées à définir des zones de protection prioritaires ou à autoriser des projets de construction, ces informations sont indispensables. Les modèles de distribution spatiale d'espèces sont donc devenus des moyens de décision importants. Les méthodes statistiques courantes comme les modèles linéaires généralisés (GLM) demandent des données de présence et d'absence des espèces. Cependant, souvent seules les données de présence sont disponibles, surtout pour les animaux migrants, rares ou cryptiques comme des papillons ou des reptiles. C'est pourquoi certains modélisateurs ont choisi des absences au hasard, avec le risque d'influencer le résultat en choisissant des fausses absences. Nous avons établi plusieurs stratégies, basées sur des données de distribution historique des papillons diurnes, pour sélectionner des absences plus fiables. Les résultats ont démontré que de meilleurs modèles pouvaient être obtenus lorsque les données proviennent des périodes de temps plus longues. En plus, la performance des modèles a pu être augmentée en considérant des données de distribution à long terme d'espèces qui occupent des habitats similaires à ceux de l'espèce cible. Vu le succès de cette stratégie, elle a été utilisée pour évaluer les effets potentiels des changements de paysage futurs sur la distribution des papillons des prairies sèches et marais, deux habitats qui ont souffert de graves détériorations. Quatre scénarios spatialement explicites, décrivant (i) l'extrapolation des changements de l'utilisation de sol tels qu'observés entre 1985 et 1997, (ii) la libéralisation des marchés agricoles, et une production agricole (iii) légèrement amoindrie et (iv) fortement diminuée, ont été utilisés pour générer des directions de changement probables. Les relations actuelles entre la distribution des espèces et l'environnement ont été déterminées par le biais des modèles statistiques et ont été utilisées pour calculer des probabilités de présence selon les scénarios dans six régions biogéographiques majeures de la Suisse, comportant le Jura, le Plateau, les Alpes du Nord, du Sud, centrales orientales et centrales occidentales. Les résultats principaux ont montré que les espèces des prairies sèches pourraient profiter d'une diminution de la production agricole, mais qu'elles pourraient aussi disparaître à cause de l'embroussaillement des terres ouvertes dû à la libéralisation des marchés agricoles. La probabilité de présence des espèces de marais a décrû à cause d'une perte générale des habitats favorables. De plus, les analyses ont confirmé que des causes humaines comme l'urbanisation, l'abandon des terres ouvertes et l'intensification de l'agriculture affectent actuellement ces espèces. Ainsi ces forces devraient être mieux prises en compte lors de planifications paysagères, pour que ces papillons diurnes puissent survivre dans leurs habitats actuels. Dans ce travail de thèse, des données historiques ont été intensivement utilisées pour reconstruire des développements anciens et pour les rendre utiles à des recherches contemporaines. Cependant, la disponibilité des données historiques et les analyses à grande échelle ont souvent limité le pouvoir explicatif des analyses. Des descripteurs pertinents pour caractériser les habitats anciens et des données suffisantes sur la distribution des espèces sont généralement rares, spécialement pour des analyses à des échelles fores. Cette situation peut être améliorée en augmentant l'étendue du site d'étude et la résolution, comme il a été fait dans cette thèse en considérant toute la Suisse avec ses communes. Cependant, les récents projets de surveillance et les techniques de collecte de données sont des sources prometteuses, qui pourraient permettre des analyses plus détaillés sur les réactions à long terme des espèces aux changements de paysage dans le futur. Ce travail a aussi montré la valeur des anciennes données de distribution, par exemple leur potentiel pour aider à localiser des' présences d'espèces encore inconnues. Les résultats peuvent contribuer à des activités de recherche à venir, qui étudieraient les distributions récentes ou futures d'espèces en considérant l'immense richesse des données de distribution historiques.
Resumo:
In Switzerland, the land management regime is characterized by a liberal attitude towards the institution of property rights, which is guaranteed by the Constitution. Under the present Swiss constitutional arrangement, authorities (municipalities) are required to take into account landowners' interests when implementing their spatial planning policy. In other words, the institution of property rights cannot be restricted easily in order to implement zoning plans and planning projects. This situation causes many problems. One of them is the gap between the way land is really used by the landowners and the way land should be used based on zoning plans. In fact, zoning plans only describe how landowners should use their property. There is no sufficient provision for handling cases where the use is not in accordance with zoning plans. In particular, landowners may not be expropriated for a non-conforming use of the land. This situation often leads to the opening of new building areas in greenfields and urban sprawl, which is in contradiction with the goals set into the Federal Law on Spatial Planning. In order to identify legal strategies of intervention to solve the problem, our paper is structured into three main parts. Firstly, we make a short description of the Swiss land management regime. Then, we focus on an innovative land management approach designed to implement zoning plans in accordance with property rights. Finally, we present a case study that shows the usefulness of the presented land management approach in practice. We develop three main results. Firstly, the land management approach brings a mechanism to involve landowners in planning projects. Coordination principle between spatial planning goals and landowners' interests is the cornerstone of all the process. Secondly, the land use is improved both in terms of space and time. Finally, the institution of property rights is not challenged, since there is no expropriation and the market stays free.
Resumo:
Species distribution models (SDMs) are increasingly used to predict environmentally induced range shifts of habitats of plant and animal species. Consequently SDMs are valuable tools for scientifically based conservation decisions. The aims of this paper are (1) to identify important drivers of butterfly species persistence or extinction, and (2) to analyse the responses of endangered butterfly species of dry grasslands and wetlands to likely future landscape changes in Switzerland. Future land use was represented by four scenarios describing: (1) ongoing land use changes as observed at the end of the last century; (2) a liberalisation of the agricultural markets; (3) a slightly lowered agricultural production; and (4) a strongly lowered agricultural production. Two model approaches have been applied. The first (logistic regression with principal components) explains what environmental variables have significant impact on species presence (and absence). The second (predictive SDM) is used to project species distribution under current and likely future land uses. The results of the explanatory analyses reveal that four principal components related to urbanisation, abandonment of open land and intensive agricultural practices as well as two climate parameters are primary drivers of species occurrence (decline). The scenario analyses show that lowered agricultural production is likely to favour dry grassland species due to an increase of non-intensively used land, open canopy forests, and overgrown areas. In the liberalisation scenario dry grassland species show a decrease in abundance due to a strong increase of forested patches. Wetland butterfly species would decrease under all four scenarios as their habitats become overgrown
Resumo:
This thesis explores the importance of literary New York City in the urban narratives of Edith Wharton and Anzia Yezierska. It specifically looks at the Empire City of the Progressive Period when the concept of the city was not only a new theme but also very much a typical American one which was as central to the American experience as had been the Western frontier. It could be argued, in fact, that the American city had become the new frontier where modern experiences like urbanization, industrialization, immigration, and also women's emancipation and suffrage, caused all kinds of sensations on the human scale from smoothly lived assimilation and acculturation to deeply felt alienation because of the constantly shifting urban landscape. The developing urban space made possible the emergence of new female literary protagonists like the working girl, the reformer, the prostitute, and the upper class lady dedicating her life to 'conspicuous consumption'. Industrialization opened up city space to female exploration: on the one hand, upper and middle class ladies ventured out of the home because of the many novel urban possibilities, and on the other, lower class and immigrant girls also left their domestic sphere to look for paid jobs outside the home. New York City at the time was not only considered the epicenter of the world at large, it was also a city of great extremes. Everything was constantly in flux: small brownstones made way for ever taller skyscrapers and huge waves of immigrants from Europe pushed native New Yorkers further uptown on the island, adding to the crowdedness and intensity of the urban experience. The city became a polarized urban space with Fifth Avenue representing one end of the spectrum and the Lower East Side the other. Questions of space and the urban home greatly mattered. It has been pointed out that the city setting functions as an ideal means for the display of human nature as well as social processes. Narrative representations of urban space, therefore, provide a similar canvas for a protagonist's journey and development. From widely diverging vantage points both Edith Wharton and Anzia Yezierska thus create a polarized city where domesticity is a primal concern. Looking at all of their New York narratives by close readings of exterior and interior city representations, this thesis shows how urban space greatly affects questions of identity, assimilation, and alienation in literary protagonists who cannot escape the influence of their respective urban settings. Edith Wharton's upper class "millionaire" heroines are framed and contained by the city interiors of "old" New York, making it impossible for them to truly participate in the urban landscape in order to develop outside of their 'Gilt Cages'. On the other side are Anzia Yezierska's struggling "immigrant" protagonists who, against all odds, never give up in their urban context of streets, rooftops, and stoops. Their New York City, while always challenging and perpetually changing, at least allows them perspectives of hope for a 'Promised Land' in the making. Central for both urban narrative approaches is the quest for a home as an architectural structure, a spiritual resting place, and a locus for identity forming. But just as the actual city embraces change, urban protagonists must embrace change also if they desire to find fulfillment and success. That this turns out to be much easier for Anzia Yezierska's driven immigrants rather than for Edith Wharton's well established native New Yorkers is a surprising conclusion to this urban theme.
Resumo:
Le Programme cantonal diabète (PCD) du canton de Vaud a pour objectifs de réduire durablement l'impact du diabète sur la population vaudoise. Il a été élaboré à l'initiative du Service de la santé publique du canton de Vaud et la stratégie du programme a été construite sur la base des propositions de plusieurs groupes de travail. Ce programme inclut divers projets complémentaires qui ont été progressivement mis sur pied à partir de 2010. 2012 marque la fin de la première phase du programme et une évaluation-bilan du programme est demandée. Cette évaluation-bilan fait suite à une première phase de travaux qui ont consisté en une évaluation de l'évaluabilité du programme. Les résultats de cette première phase ont été délivrés en décembre 2011 au groupe de pilotage et consignés dans un rapport en février 2012. L'IUMSP propose donc pour 2012 des travaux en continuité de ce qui a été fait en 2011 et qui vont dans le sens d'un bilan critique et de propositions pour un système de monitoring à long terme du programme, comportant des indicateurs d'activité (à harmoniser lorsque c'est possible dans des projets similaires), des indicateurs de couverture et de résultats. [p. 7]
Resumo:
The role of land cover change as a significant component of global change has become increasingly recognized in recent decades. Large databases measuring land cover change, and the data which can potentially be used to explain the observed changes, are also becoming more commonly available. When developing statistical models to investigate observed changes, it is important to be aware that the chosen sampling strategy and modelling techniques can influence results. We present a comparison of three sampling strategies and two forms of grouped logistic regression models (multinomial and ordinal) in the investigation of patterns of successional change after agricultural land abandonment in Switzerland. Results indicated that both ordinal and nominal transitional change occurs in the landscape and that the use of different sampling regimes and modelling techniques as investigative tools yield different results. Synthesis and applications. Our multimodel inference identified successfully a set of consistently selected indicators of land cover change, which can be used to predict further change, including annual average temperature, the number of already overgrown neighbouring areas of land and distance to historically destructive avalanche sites. This allows for more reliable decision making and planning with respect to landscape management. Although both model approaches gave similar results, ordinal regression yielded more parsimonious models that identified the important predictors of land cover change more efficiently. Thus, this approach is favourable where land cover change pattern can be interpreted as an ordinal process. Otherwise, multinomial logistic regression is a viable alternative.
Resumo:
Cette thèse explore les implications politiques de la montée en puissance des normes internationales sur nos sociétés contemporaines et pose la problématique des dynamiques participatives des représentants des consommateurs au sein des formes de pouvoir non étatique à l'aide du cas de l'Organisation internationale de normalisation (ISO). Le renforcement du pouvoir des normes internationales et autres spécifications techniques soulève d'importants enjeux démocratiques qui portent aussi bien sur la représentativité des acteurs qui les élaborent, sur l'articulation des prérogatives publiques et privées dans la gouvernance de la mondialisation, que sur le rôle de l'expertise dans la reconnaissance de ces nouvelles formes de pouvoir. La participation du monde associatif intervient sur ces différents enjeux de manière complexe. Cette recherche s'inscrit à la suite des études en relations internationales/économie politique internationale sur les formes d'autorité non étatique et s'inspire du concept de traduction issu de la sociologie des sciences et techniques pour mettre en lumière le rôle des spécifications techniques dans la construction d'une société de consommation centrée sur la liberté de choix et la façon dont les associations de consommateurs se saisissent des arènes de normalisation pour y faire valoir des préoccupations collectives, leur expertise et leur identité. Cette thèse défend l'idée que les consommateurs participent à la construction de l'autorité des normes internationales par leur rôle dans la traduction qui permet de relier les spécifications techniques au fonctionnement des marchés, au cadre réglementaire de la loi et aux préoccupations sociétales. L'analyse repose sur une observation ethnographique des délibérations d'un comité technique de l'ISO, une recherche-‐action, la réalisation d'entretiens et la consultation de documents d'archives de l'ISO. -- This thesis explores the political significance of the rise of international standards on contemporary societies and questions the participatory dynamics of consumers' representatives within nonstate forms of power, using the case of the International organization for standardization (ISO). The power granted to international standards and other technical specifications raises important democratic issues regarding the representativity of standard-‐ writers, the public-‐private relationships involved in this form of governance or the expertise sustaining the recognition of such new forms of power. The participation of civil society associations affect such issues in complex ways. This research relies on international relations/international political economy approaches of nonstate authority and takes inspiration from the concept of translation developed by science and technology studies to highlight the crucial role played by technical specifications in building a consumer society based on the freedom of choice as well as how consumers' associations take stock of standardization arenas to promote collective issues and claim their expertise and identity. This thesis argues that consumers contribute to the construction of the authority of international standards through their role in the translation that links international standards to the market society, the regulatory state as well as to societal preoccupation. The analysis is based on an ethnographic observation of deliberations within an ISO technical committee, a research-‐action, interviews as well as on the consultation of ISO archives.